The data is dry

September 9, 2005

The federal government may not have been prepared for Katrina's fury, but Nick Kottyan, CEO of DataChambers in Winston-Salem, has the same response to every hurricane brewing in the south Atlantic - get ready.

"When we saw Katrina developing two weeks ago, we starting contacting our clients in south Florida," says Kottyan, whose three-year-old company provides complete data backup for businesses, as well as housing their IT infrastructure on huge servers. "We asked: 'Do you have everything backed up? Have you added any servers?' We took a proactive stance."

DataChambers, located in the enormous former AT&T manufacturing operation on Lexington Road, also has what it calls a "work force recovery area," complete with desks and computers. A client displaced by disaster can relocate temporarily to the center to run the bones of its operation.

Last week, a group of traders with a financial services firm in Boca Raton, Fla., whose offices were left without power, worked out of Winston-Salem for several days and their company didn't miss a beat.

It's much worse along the Gulf Coast, where Kottyan says DataChambers serves about 150 locations representing about 25 companies. Its biggest client base is in Florida - last year's quartet of hurricanes boosted business - but it has clients in New Orleans, Alabama and Mississippi, too.

"When we saw this coming, we initiated our own disaster-implementation plan," Kottyan says of his 17-person staff. "We made sure our own infrastructure was in place. No vacations. No weekends off. We established who would be on call."

Many of DataChambers' Gulf Coast and New Orleans clients have seen their physical locations wiped out or swamped with water. Their offices and servers are gone. Several afflicted companies are now contemplating relocating their IT functions to DataChambers for several months.

"We've been helping them reroute their Internet traffic or move their servers to branch locations," Kottyan says. "We are making sure that companies in that area are up and running and functioning as well as they can."

-- Justin Catanoso, Triad Business Journal, Sept 9, 2005

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For more information contact:
Adam Moffitt, 336-499-7211
For more information on DataChambers, LLC:
http://www.datachambers.com